


Linger

by jacanas



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-01-27 19:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1719335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacanas/pseuds/jacanas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his dreams, he recovered faster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Mizumono. Currently a one-shot.

In his dreams, he recovered faster.  He saw her, Abigail, the present held away from him for so many months, and pulled her into his arms to protect her, keep her safe from what was to come.  He asked where _he_ was, turned immediately and pulled the trigger two, six, eight times.  He watched the holes and blood mingle with the blood already there, watched Hannibal fall.  He held Abigail safe behind him, and she cried with relief and fear.  

In his dreams, he waited outside in the rain with Alana, leaning over her to keep the rain from her face.  He held her head steady on the ground and assured her everything would be alright, to hold on, _hold on._  He was there when the police arrived and flooded the house, and he listened as they shot Hannibal down.  He watched them load her into an ambulance, watched Abigail walk out of the house and run to his arms.  He held her, safe and whole and possibly filled with resentment.  The plan hadn’t gone as Hannibal promised it would.  

In other dreams he grabbed Abigail and pulled her from the house, outside in the storm to wait with Alana.  The two women who meant anything at all to him huddled together in the wet cold, Alana gasping for air as Abigail cradled her head.  Will ordered Hannibal to freeze the moment he appeared in the door, and Hannibal dropped his knives and knelt on the ground as the police arrived.  

In the good dreams, Jack killed him before Will even got there.  

In the best dreams, he took Hannibal’s offer to leave earlier than planned, sparing Jack and Alana and discovering Abigail the night before.  He waited for a better opportunity to subdue Hannibal far away from his house, where he held the home advantage. Away from the people Will cared about.  

He never dreamed of what life could have been like with Hannibal and Abigail.  His breath caught in his chest when he considered it.

He knew he had to be dead, because all of his dreams ended well.  To him, this must be heaven.  

He heard voices sometimes, standing over his corpse and having debates over treatments.  He saw the good doctor himself on occasion, eyes coal black hollows where light never left.  He watched as Hannibal pushed a needle into his arm, depressed the plunger, and as his eyes began to roll back Hannibal would ask, “What do you see?”

He saw nothing, those times, and it was wonderful.  

His visions mingled with his dreams, as they always had, and he no longer felt afraid.  He looked down at his chest and saw flowers filling the cavity, beautiful and colorful, shaped as the organs Hannibal had removed.  He saw the meals they would become, elegant and far more refined than the source.  He tasted the spice, and to spite his host asked for salt.  

Hannibal obliged.  

Abigail smiled at him from across the table and cut a sliver of his heart.  He watched her chew it slowly and felt it in his chest.  “See?” she said as his blood leaked from her lips.  “See?”

He reached for a knife, he couldn’t remember why.  No, he could - to protect her from Hannibal, who was standing behind her now, watching him - but the table was melting, the chairs and the food washed away in a flood of water until there were just the three of them, Hannibal holding Abigail to his chest.  Will tried to stand but he couldn’t; he tried to speak but he could only choke.   _No_ , he begged, _don’t -_

And Abigail jolted in Hannibal’s arms, sent an elbow into his ribs.  She fell to the floor where Will’s blood spread and picked up the gun.  She aimed and fired, ten times fired, and they watched the man fall and twitch on the floor.  His blood spread to mingle with Will’s, and Abigail sat next to him in the kitchen to wait until help arrived, and whispered in his ear of better days to come.  

 _Hang on_ , her voice pleaded, _you’ll be fine._

_You need to wake up._

He didn’t want to wake up.  She might not be waiting for him.  

They stood in the river up to their thighs and he showed her a new lure.  She watched with bright eyes, alive and safe, and they moved slowly sometimes because his wound hurt on rainy days.  They ate lunch by the water and his dogs played in the river and snapped at crayfish.  He showed her how to find them under the rocks, and she squealed when she saw one for the first time, skipping away and refusing to touch it.  

He showed her how to boil them over a fire, and taught her how to eat them.  He explained sucking the brains from the shell, and she told him he was disgusting.  She refused to try it, and they laughed.  

He was in bed with Alana, both fully clothed.  They didn’t need to make love to share a connection.  He held her tight in his arms, safe from the world, and she curled her legs into his.  He kissed her forehead and murmured for her to forget, just forget.  Stop thinking, if only for the night.  

“Can you?” she asked, and they both know he couldn’t.  His guilt would creep in to press on his eyelids, and she knew he was sad because his hands tightened on her, his anchor to reality.  

“I did this to us,” he said, and she kissed him to shut him up.  

He called Jack that night, instead of Hannibal, to form a plan.  They went in together, Will first and Hannibal without any forewarning.  He fell because he had to - in this dream, he had to.  

He never saw what Hannibal did to Jack.  His dreams avoided the subject.  

 _Hang on_ , she whispered, her voice like spun silk.  It was hoarse, and raspy, and yet it sounded beautiful to him in his dreams.  

In his dreams, she had no scar on her neck, and her ears were perfectly aligned.  

“Abigail,” he whispered past the tubes and the pain.  He couldn’t feel his body.  

 _I’m here,_ she lied.   _I’m waiting for you.  We’re all waiting for you._

When he woke up, he stepped into his first nightmare in weeks.  

 


	2. Chapter 2

The voice is always insistent, gentle, and safe.  It is warm and familiar, along with the touch along his hand, close to where the IV line is embedded into his skin.  Sometimes the fingers drift across the needle taped to him, and his mind cannot help but notice to constant sting for those few seconds before pushing it forcefully aside again.  

His fingers twitch, those times.  

 

* * *

 

“It’s quieter than I thought it’d be,” Jack said as they sat on the frozen lake, their lines dangling inside of a narrow hole through the ice.  

“I like it quiet,” Will said.  “You knew that.”

“I did.”

They fished, and they drank.  They spoke of work, the arrest, the asylum.  Jack didn’t bother looking guilty; he said he felt guilty enough already.  

“You never apologized,” Will said as he reeled up his line.  

“Cut me some slack,” Jack said.  “You threw up an ear.”

“She was alive,” Will said.  “She was alive and I never knew.”

“You didn’t know much of anything.  I thought you were the best.”  Jack, seeing that Will’s beer was finished, offered the rest of his own.  

“You said that, not me.”

“The best unless it’s someone you like.  Good thing it wasn’t Alana.  We’d still be chasing our tails.”

Will sipped his drink and tried to contain his shame.  

“It’s not your fault,” Jack said after a while.  “Being loyal’s not a bad thing.”

“You shouldn’t have gone in alone, Jack.”  Will’s angry, and his fishing rod reels in his agitation.  “You should’ve waited.”  

Jack is looking at him.  There is a wave coming in behind him, where he can’t see.  They’re about to be underwater.  

“Why didn’t you wait?” Will asks, and the wave crashes down.  

 

* * *

 

When he opens his eyes, all he feels is exhaustion.  He can’t focus beyond the sensation of something in his throat, preventing him from breathing on his own.  Something threaded down into his esophagus.  He wants to cough and writhe, but he wants to slip away more.  

He closes his eyes and slips away.  

The second time he opens them, he recognizes the thing in his throat as a tube.  His eyelids flutter as he fights to focus on the plastic flexing over his tongue.  He starts to raise his hand and feels pressure holding it still.  He closes his eyes again to drift, still too caught up in the surging tide of pain relievers to allow himself to surface.  

He feels gentle fingers stroke across his forehead, a soothing woman’s voice humming into his ear.  He sleeps.  

 

* * *

 

Will was standing in Hannibal’s office.  The perpetually clean interior was rumpled, two bodies sprawled on the floor at his feet.  The metal buck and its stand were overturned onto the ground.  There were no police, no Jack and no Hannibal.  There was only Will, and his memory of the scene.  

Will remembered the first time Hannibal Lecter had betrayed him.  It happened weeks before the final call-out, when the crushing weight of realization had nearly stolen his breath in a dark house, in a dark kitchen, flanked by a creature he could no longer trust.  

There hadn't been a grand gesture or a loud declaration.  He hadn't been holding a gun.

_I kissed Alana Bloom._

He recognized that at the time, his crawling disappointment was unfair.  Hannibal presented himself well as a source of support and solace in a time of confusion.  Now he knew better - but at the time, he had not.  And the guilt of his immediate rush of anger, of disappointment in a friend, gnawed at him until he realized that Hannibal was no friend at all.

He had sought out solace that night, driving over an hour in dangerous weather to seek out someone he could trust with his news.  He had limited options - Alana was the source of the issue, and Jack couldn't know.  He wished, now, that he had turned to Beverly, who at least always seemed to try to do the right thing, even when she thought he was a murderer.

He turned to Hannibal instead, and Hannibal had thrown his life back into his face without a second thought.  Will could imagine the thought process now that he better understood the motivations:  Will, emotionally distraught and panicked, presenting himself so openly to Hannibal's design.  The man couldn't resist the opportunity to prod when Will was so vulnerable, to see what would happen if he sent Will into a murderer's home while his mind was hearing the screams of dying dogs.  

He retraced the implicated fight, the intricate steps involved.  Tobias had stood just behind Will inside of his basement, surrounded by the intestines of his victims, and attempted to strangle him with weapons of his own design.  He had stabbed and killed the other officers, strangled another.  During his documented crime, he carefully splayed the muscles of a man’s throat and inserted the stem of a cello inside, playing his vocal cords in a facsimile of elevated concerto.  

He had not broken anyone’s neck.

The evidence was there, and now Will could see it.  Hannibal had known Budge was a killer and sent Will to see what would happen.  It was the second time he put the profiler directly into the path of a known killer, and the first time he’d sent Will alone.  

It was the start of their game, the first of a series of killers they sent to each other.  A dark and twisted game of Red Rover which was only won when one of them died in the end.  

Will had never directly attacked Hannibal.  He’d held a gun to the man, but never fired.  In this way, he felt that he’d won.  

“Is that how you feel?” Tobias asked from the floor.  His head wound leaked sticky blood onto his collar.  

“Typhoid and swans, it all comes from the same place,” Franklin said.  His head was twisted, his Adam’s apple out of synch with the rest of his face.  “It’s terrible, being lonely.  All he wanted was a friend.”

They both watched Will, accusing him without words.  Will felt breath at his back, and turned into Peter Bernadone’s arms.  

“Don’t blame the animals,” he stuttered into Will’s ear.  “Man is the only creature that kills to kill.”  He handed Will a knife, and walked him through the stable to the corpse of a horse.  They stared down as the belly began to shudder and quake.  

“I wanted to hate him,” Will said as the fingers poked through.  

“You never could,” said Peter, as the stomach was ripped open and the organs spilled forth.  

 

* * *

 

He has no idea how many times he’s opened his eyes now, except to say that the sensation of sudden light no longer shocks him.  The tube is still down his throat; the weight on his hand is still present.  He slides his eyes to the side to see who it is who watches over him in the night.  

He would have given many things to open his eyes to Alana, or Abigail, or God help him, even Freddie Lounds.  The woman sitting at his side is slim, composed and stern.  She suffered at the hands of another, and understood victimization in an intimate way.  It means he can’t hide underneath his verbal rock and drive her away with pragmatism.  

Not that he could right now.  The tube makes his throat hurt, now that he is awake.  

Margot meets his eyes, and he is too weak to turn his head away.  

“Survive him,” she says, and Will finally understands how cruel the words are.  


	3. Chapter 3

Beverly had a knack for the reel.  She had pulled in three bass already, and Abigail, who had yet to land one, was asking her for pointers.  

“How did you learn to fish?” Will asked her.  

“What am I, chopped liver?” Beverly glanced back at him; his face was twisted in revolted amusement.  “Don’t answer that.”

It made his shoulders itch.  

“You have interesting coping mechanisms,” he said.

“Some people make fish bait, I teach guys to shoot straight.”  She yanked on the reel hard and yelled when she felt the hook set.  “How’s that shoulder?”

“It’s alright.”

“Uh huh.  Help me pull this one in?”  She offered him the rod.  He reached for it, but the reel crashed into the water the moment she let go.  They watched the reel jolt and speed away, pulled by the fish at the other end.  

“I’m sure that’s a metaphor for something, but damned if I know what,” Beverly said.  Will looked into the half of her face that was left and shrugged.  

 

* * *

 

“Don’t tell me who’s alive,” he rasps.  “I don’t want to know.”

Margot looks away, out the window.

“You need to hear it sometime,” she says.  He lifts a weak hand, splays his fingers, tilts them back and forth.  No.

“It’s been three weeks,” he says past the fingers.  “I can handle three more.”

Margot ignores him.  

“Alana is...badly hurt.”  She doesn’t want to discuss how badly, and Will doesn’t ask.  “I think Jack is afraid to come and visit.”

“Abigail?”  Will tries to ignore the hopeful flutter in his chest.  Margot continues to look out the window and the hope fades.  “Nevermind.”

“I’ll tell you,” Margot says gently.  “When you’re ready.”

Will can’t speak.  Margot waits a minute to see if he’ll try, and then continues.  

“You’re healing well.  Most of the blood in that kitchen was yours.”

Will closes his eyes and lets the medicine begin to float him away.  Margot’s hand squeezes against his, and he turns his head in her direction.  

“Where do you go, when you close your eyes?” she asks.  

“Somewhere better,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 

Freddie Lounds manages to wait until he’s been awake a full two days before popping into his hospital room.  She stands at the foot of his bed, face set in a sympathetic expression betrayed by the sharp steel of her eyes.  She has her arms crossed.  

She’s angry.

“Did you know?”  She demands rather than asks, an immediate accusation.  Will doesn’t have to ask what she’s referring to.  

“No,” he says.  His throat is still raw and the single syllable cracks in the middle.  No-o.  Freddie’s eyes soften and her eyelids droop a bit, matching the rest of her face.  She believes him.  

“Your dogs are fine,” she says, and he blinks and creases his brow.  

“You -”

“Dr. Bloom couldn’t take them this time.  I’ve got two of the little ones.  Brian Zeller has the rest.”

He tries to think of something intelligent to say.  He only manages:  “What about Alana’s?”

“Mrs. Crawford is watching her,” Freddie says.  After a short pause, she adds, “she asked Hannibal Lecter to watch over Jack after she passes.”

Dinner the night before.  The lamb on the table.  Too subtle, Dr. Lecter, he thinks angrily.  

“This isn’t her fault,” Will says.  His anger bleeds into the phrasing.  He can see the article text flashing through Freddie’s head.  He wonders if the headline will mention his name.  

“It’s not yours, either.”

He shuts down.  Freddie waits him out, until he huffs and looks at her again.  

“What?” he asks, bitter at her expectant look.  

“It’s not your fault, Will,” she says, and Will wishes he could stand and walk away.  “Abigail -”

“Don’t,” he says.  “Don’t tell me.”

“You don’t know?”  Freddie is surprised; she uncrosses her arms and sits on the edge of his bed, gleaming with the need to share.  “No one’s told you?”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he says.  He’ll beg, if he has to.  

“Will -”

“I said no.”  He closes his eyes.

“She’s alive.”  Freddie is still sitting on the bed when he opens his eyes again.  He stares at her in tired desperation.  

“Please don’t lie to me,” he says hoarsely.  

“She’s on machines,” Freddie says, and he can see that she’s making an effort to be kind.  It makes her forehead crease.  “She lost a lot of blood.  Right now the machines are breathing for her.”

“Can she wake up?”  Hope, the tiniest flutter at the base of his ribcage.  He tried to stamp it out.  

“They don’t know,” she says.  He should be worried that she’s gained access to all of this medical information, but she is, after all, Freddie Lounds.  

“You’ve left her out of your articles?” he asks.  He breaks into a sweat, working to sound so casual as he asks.  Freddie says nothing.  “Tell me - have you?”

“I can’t write about her yet, her story has no ending.”  It’s not the answer he wants.  His fingers twitch.  

“What, you’ll only publish it posthumously?”  It’s not what he wants to say at all.  

“You’re her legal guardian,” she says.  “You’ll need to decide.”

He starts to ask, and then he stops himself because he knows.  She’s on machines; they’re breathing for her.  He’s her legal guardian.  

Will has lived a life full of terrible moments.  He counts the instant he feels himself beginning to cry in front of Freddie Lounds among the worst.  

 


	4. Chapter 4

A knock is all the warning he has before Kade Prurnell steps through the hospital room door.  

“You can consider your expunged record a quiet apology,” she says, and Will says nothing.  He feels tired normally, and the moment she stepped into the room all of his remaining energy fled.  

“Randall Tier is another matter,” she says.  “There’s no way to spin that you beat him to death and mutilated the body.”

“And ate a piece,” he adds, and it is so satisfying to see how her face pinches in with disgust.  “I was under cover.”

“We need to catch him,” Kade says.  “You’re the best chance of catching him we have, and you can’t do that if you’re rotting away in jail.”

“What, Frederick won’t take me back?”  It hurts to bait her, because of how his diaphragm stutters against his intestines, but he can’t resist the wounded look she gets when she feels guilty.

“Dr. Chilton is still recovering, and you were not sick when you killed Randall Tier.  That would be a jail sentence, in the general population.”

She thinks he wouldn’t survive.  He finds this amusing.  He did beat a man to death and mutilate the body.  Still, her guilt is something he can prod at, and he has no intention of losing this advantage.

“So your deal is, I help you catch Hannibal, or you sentence me to death in prison,” Will says.  “Did I miss anything?”

“You should know that it’s not just your charges on the line,” Kade says.  “Jack and Miss Hobbs’ freedom is also contingent upon your cooperation.”

He tries not to react, he really does, but hearing any version of Abigail’s name is enough to painfully twist his guts.  

“Jack can take care of himself,” he grinds out between sharp gasps of pain, and he can see that Kade knows who the real trump card is.  She doesn’t smile gleefully, or gloat; she simply waits.  

“Fine,” he says tightly.  “For Abigail.”

Let there be no mistake about who he’s protecting.  Kade thinks this is a hatchet hanging around his neck; she doesn’t know that he has more power over Abigail’s life than ever before.  Either that, or she feels that he would never choose to end her suffering.  

It’s safe for her to keep believing that.  

They both hear the rumble of wheels on the hospital floor, and Will finds himself sweating.  He knows who must be coming.  

“I’m sorry, Mr. Graham,” Kade says, and Will can barely stutter a soft “What?’

“You contributed to the highest closure rate the BSU has ever seen.  If we had taken your claims seriously, you and Jack wouldn’t have felt desperate enough to do this.”  Kade looks like she might actually die from saying these words.  Will remembers her threatening him with the death penalty, and tries not to feel sorry for her.  There’s a hesitant knock on the door, and both of them heave a sigh of relief.  

“Don’t ever do that again,” Will says, and he means it.  Kade smiles, a bitter, resigned thing, and opens the door wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through.  

“I’ll be in touch,” she says as she steps aside.  Will does everything in his power not to react to seeing Alana behind her, low to the ground in her wheelchair.  Abigail’s name, Alana’s reality; he doesn’t know how many more broken lives he can shoulder.  He hopes Jack stays away.  

Alana draws up short next to his bed, takes his hand, and watches him.  They watch each other, each enveloped in their own thoughts, hardly seeing the other.  Will wants to talk about the weather, or her crummy hospital clothes.  He wants to make a crack about how she can outrun him now.  

“It wasn’t your fault, Alana,” is what he says.  Her guilt is giving him a headache.  

“I feel like it was,” she says.  “Chilton believed you before I did.”

Will stays quiet, seeing she has more to say.  He tries to squeeze her hand, and somehow the muscles of his arm protest.  

“I should’ve trusted you,” she says.  “You’d done so much good, doing exactly what you were doing - and this one time, I refused to believe you.”

“I’m not going to blame you for being loyal,” Will says.  “He was my friend, too.”

“Some friend,” she says, looking down at his heavily bandaged stomach.  

“I’ll hold the Chilton thing against you, though,” he says.  “Frederick Chilton, for God’s sake.”

She laughs, just as he intended, and he smiles to see outright mirth from her.  For one glorious moment, he’s lost to her smile and forgets why they’re even here.  

The moment passes.  

“How bad?” he asks, because he has to know.  The notches on his mental bedpost are growing in number by the moment.  She has stitches on her forehead, her breathing is harsh and painful.  He can see how her midsection is billowing out from the bandaging beneath.  The hand he’s not holding is hovering in the air in a cast, attached to her upper torso.  She must have cracked or broken ribs, based on her breathing patterns, which meant they couldn’t fully wrap the cast -

“Stop it, Will,” she says, and he doesn’t try to pretend she’s wrong.  

“I did this to you,” he says, and her hand squeezes his until his knuckles hurt.  

“No,” she says.  “I did.”

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes he saw the dogs.  He walked them across his Wolf Trap property, tossing a stick for the ones who would fetch and enjoying the pleasant weather.  This time, Gideon is walking next to him.

“I mean, you did try to warn me,” the doctor said.  “I respect that, I really do.  But on the other hand, Jesus Christ.”

“I didn’t see what happened to you,” Will said as the dogs padded around their legs.  “You did kill your wife and her family over a dinner.”

“I’m not looking for sympathy, Mr. Graham.  Far from it.  Still, a modicum of absolution isn’t too much to ask.”  Will was lying on a table; Freddie Lounds stood mute beside him.  He couldn’t move.  

“I didn’t kill you,” he said.

“You feel like you did,” Gideon said, and began cutting across his belly.  Will clenched his fists and tried to bear it, knowing this was justice.  He felt a slap on his face to keep his attention focused.  

“Miss Lounds, if you please,” Gideon said, and Freddie held the air pump for him.  In, and out.  She looked predatory.  

“You’re going to make me rich,” she said, just as Gideon scooped in and began peeling out his intestines.

 

* * *

 

“Will!   _Will_!”  Large, strong hands clutching at his shoulders.  Will was thrashing so hard that he’s certain some of his sutures had come undone.  The voice is deep and slow, and he tries to drink it in.  

“Will, can you hear me?”  Jack’s thick palm presses over his sweaty forehead.  “Are you here now?”

“I’m sorry,” Will says, and Jack shakes his head.  

“Not now,” he says, and Will realizes this isn’t a dream.  Jack has thick gauze taped against the side of his neck.  Otherwise, he seems fine.  

Will tries to suppress the instant thought:   _It’s not fair_.

Jack pats his shoulder as the nurse rushes in, pulling up Will’s gown to check the damage.  

“It’s fine,” she says to his relief and Jack’s surprise.  “We’ll do an ultrasound to be sure the interior is undamaged.”  

“OK,” Will says numbly.  He doesn’t have the heart to fight.  

“Kade Prurnell spoke with me,” Jack says once the nurse has gone.  Will notices that he’s sitting instead of standing.  He must feel strange, without his physical presence as a crutch.  

“She spoke with me too,” Will says carefully.  

“I can handle myself, Will,” Jack says, and Will lets out a short bark of a laugh, followed by a low grunt of pain.  

“I can,” Jack repeats, “and I can handle Abigail, too.”  

Will looks up at the ceiling and tries to block him out.  If that had ever been an option, he wouldn’t be in this bed today.  

“Listen to me, Will,” Jack says, as though he doesn’t already know Will can’t ignore him.  “If you never want to go near this case again, tell me.  Tell me right now.  I will do everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

“You don’t have as much power as before, Jack,” Will says.  Jack shrugs.  

“I have more than they think.”  He looks up to the window that Margot likes to look out from.  “I was there, Will.  I heard what he did to you.  To Abigail.  I heard you -”

“Don’t,” Will says, and he wonders if his life is this, now.  A long series of begging not to be told the truth, only to be ignored anyway.  He wonders why he bothers.  

“Just say the word,” Jack says, “and I won’t let them touch you.”

Will doesn’t know what to do.  


End file.
